This blog is totally independent, unpaid and has only three major objectives.
The first is to inform readers of news and happenings in the e-Health domain, both here in Australia and world-wide.
The second is to provide commentary on e-Health in Australia and to foster improvement where I can.
The third is to encourage discussion of the matters raised in the blog so hopefully readers can get a balanced view of what is really happening and what successes are being achieved.

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

The Productivity Commission Provides Some Interesting Information on the ePIP Program. Raises Some Questions.

A week or so ago the Productivity Commission provided some interesting information on the ePIP program.

Here is the page and link to the full report.

Health

The Health volume E includes performance reporting for Primary and community health, Public hospitals and Mental health management.

It also includes a sector overview for Health. This volume was released on 4 February 2015.

Download the full volume

Download the sector overview

The sector overview provides an introduction to the Primary and community health (chapter 10), Public hospitals (chapter 11), and Mental health management (chapter 12) chapters of this Report. It provides an overview of the health sector, presenting both contextual information and high level performance information.

“In accordance with the purpose of the PIP eHealth incentive to encourage general practices to kee p up-to-date with the latest developments in eHealth, new eligibility requirements were introduced from 1 February 2013, requiring practices to

5- and, participate in the eHealth record system and be capable of creating and uploading Shared Health Summaries and Event Summaries using compliant software.

A number of practices took time to meet these requirements, as reflected in the sharp decrease in the share of PIP practices registered as having taken up the eHealth incentive in May 2013 and the recovery in May 2014.

Under the previous requirements, practices were required to :have a secure messaging capability provided by a n eligible supplier; have (or have applied for) a location/site Public Key Infrastructure(PKI) certificate for the practice and each practice branch, and make sure that each medical practitioner from the practice has (or has applied for) an individual PKI certificate; and, provide practitioners from the practice with access to a range of key electronic clinical resources.”

The participation rates in receiving payments were:

April 2014 - 86.3%

May 2013 - 72.2%

May 2012 - 88.3%

May 2011 - 87.6%

May 2010 - 78.5%

It is also interesting that participation is 85+% in and close to cities and down to 60% in the remote areas.

What I find interesting with all this is 86% complying with point 5 (PCEHR Connectivity and Use) and being paid while we see such low reported use by clinicians.

My read is that they can use the PCEHR but don’t see the value or can ‘t be bothered.

It will take real genius to fix this I reckon despite the claims of NEHTA and DOH.